u/Asuma01

Hey everyone. I wanted to share this build since it turned into a bigger project than expected, and the timing worked out nicely with SteamOS 3.8.10 finally adding support for Intel CPUs.

I started with parts salvaged from my wife's old iBUYPOWER prebuilt. She wanted a gaming pc but never ended up using it much because she likes playing on the couch in front of our 75in TV. The gaming rig sat mostly unused except for web browsing and spreadsheet use. From the PC I decided to salvage the i7 11700F, 16GB DDR4, and a CWT GPS650S 650W Gold PSU. The old GPU was an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super. Rather than keep the original mid-tower, we wanted something genuinely small for the living room, and that could fit a full size ATX PSU so I went with the SilverStone SG13B, an 11.5L mini ITX cube case that fits a full size ATX PSU and GPU. It was also pretty inexpensive at about $68. I found an ASRock B560M-ITX/AC off eBay since 1200 lga itx motherboards are no longer in production and it had built in wifi. Luckily this motherboard worked fine because I didn't even think to check for Linux/steamOS compatibility!

For the GPU, I went back and forth a lot. Started out planning for 1080p on a budget RX 7600, then decided screw it, lets go for 4K with a goal of 60-90 fps. I decided on a Sapphire PULSE RX 9060 XT 16GB. I had to be picky about the specific card model, since the case's GPU length limit is tight and most 9060 XT variants are too long.

I kept the original non-modular PSU to save cost, which meant a genuinely tedious 3 hour long cable management session, where I used zip ties everywhere to try and condense down the size of all the extra PSU cables. But it fit! The trickier issue turned out to be CPU cooling. Originally I had wanted to keep the cpu cooler from the iBUYPOWER, but the PSU mounts directly above the CPU area, my air cooler was starved for airflow, it only had about 2-3mm of clearance from the bottom of the PSU. It was idling at 53°C just in the bios. And thermal throttling at around 95°C when running Palworld. Ended up swapping to a Thermalright Aqua Elite 120 V3 AIO, which barely fit the case alongside the GPU, that took idle down to 37°C in the bios. After a full hour of combined CPU+GPU stress testing, temps topped out around 59°C in OCCT. Also had a weird SteamOS install hang, tied to kdump on a slower USB drive. Swapping to a faster flash drive fixed it.

End result: Stable, quiet, comfortably cool, running Palworld and everything else I've thrown at it so far, at a min of 60fps at 4K. I haven't had a chance to use FSR yet. No games were currently playing supports it. Happy to answer questions on part choices or the case-fit math if anyone's considering something similar in an SG13B.

Overall cost of this build.

Silverstone SG13B mini ITX case: $68.00
Used ASRock B560M-ITX/AC mini ITX motherboard: $105.00
Crucial P310 1TB SSD, PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2: $153.00
Thermalrlght Aqua Elite 120 V3 AIO: $34.00
SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB: $466.00
TOTAL: $826.00

Repurposed parts.
Intel i7 11700F
T-Force Delta DDR4 16GB RAM
CWT GPS650S 650W Gold PSU
500GB Neo Forza SATA SSD.

I plan on selling the left over parts from the old gaming rig to help recoup some of the build cost.

Enjoy!